Public

In announcing a new name, new direction, and new marketing strategy that puts more emphasis on services and content and less on low price, Dish did a remarkably good job of obscuring a salient point; the digital divide still exists, and because it does a less-than-enthralling broadband offer looks like it should have legs.

Dish used CES to promote a whole-home Kangaroo-themed client-server set-top combo (Hopper and its sidekick Joey) with tuners that can handle 6 HD recordings at once and a hard drive deep enough to swallow 2,000 hours of HD programming in a single gulp.

Retail shopping solutions are making their presence felt at CES as either a cooperative offering, or in competition with the brick and mortar stores.

In the past, carriers and Internet service providers had multiple tools to ensure that I remained a loyal citizen of their domain. In the early days of the Internet, the easiest way to get an email address was from my service provider, and once I began to use and distribute this email address, the thought of moving to an alternative broadband provider was delayed by the thought of how painful it would be to switch my email address.